Posted on 05/29/2005 7:55:52 AM PDT by kosta50
BARI, Italy (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI visited the eastern port of Bari on his first papal trip Sunday and pledged to make healing the 1,000-year-old rift with the Orthodox church a "fundamental" commitment of his papacy.
Benedict made the pledge in a city closely tied to the Orthodox church. Bari, on Italy's Adriatic coast, is considered a "bridge" between East and West and is home to the relics of St. Nicholas of Myra, a 4th-Century saint who is one of the most popular in both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.
Benedict referred to Bari as a "land of meeting and dialogue" with the Orthodox in his homily at a Mass that closed a national religious conference. It was his first pilgrimage outside Rome since being elected the 265th leader of the Roman Catholic Church on April 19.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
An attempt at unity without a council would be an exercise in futility. Surely you aren't suggesting simply sweep our past under the carpet as if it never happened.
Thank you for your very kind words.
(Regarding the Filioque) In 1996, Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Bartholomew celebrated the Eucharistic Liturgy of the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul at St. Peter's during which both recited the creed in its original Greek and proclaimed a fundamental consensus on the issue of the procession of the Holy Spirit. After the Liturgy (during which the Patriarch stepped down and did not receive communion), both declared unity in fundamental theological issues. The background document http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=1176&longdesc by the PCPCU is illustrative that this issue no longer plagues the leaders involved in ecumenical discussions. Eastern Catholic Churches recite the creed without the Filioque. The peace of Photius and John VIII seems to have prevailed, for the moment. Only those interested in polemics continue to bring up an issue that should not have poisoned the Church at all.
Pope Bl. Pius IX, Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854. That is the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Reread John 3:16, perhaps then the truth shall set you free.
For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son: that whosoever believeth in him may not perish, but may have life everlasting.
I'm missing the whole "the Blessed Virgin was not redeemed and cleansed from original sin by Christ" bit here. Is that an addition in the Protestant Bible?
Please reference Romans, chapters 3, 4 and 5.
Nothing contradictory to Florence in there. Please reference Daniel 4:24: "Wherefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable to thee, and redeem thou thy sins with alms, and thy iniquities with works of mercy to the poor: perhaps he will forgive thy offences" and Tobit 4:11-12: "For alms deliver from all sin, and from death, and will not suffer the soul to go into darkness. Alms shall be a great confidence before the most high God, to all them that give it".
Two interesting things about the Pope's statement. First, the choice of Bari, which is in the region of Italy which was Orthodox the longest. And second, his call to the laity and ordinary clergy of his confession. It's almost as if he's trying to give the Latin church a 'booster shot' of Orthodox ecclesiology: remember that our magesterium, while in some measure concentrated in the teaching charism of the episcopate, permeates the Church, so that the laity, monastics, and ordinary clergy are as much responsible for the propogation, defense, and yes, even definition of the Faith (the last only in the extrordinary circumstances when heresies challenge the Faith, since a council cannot be universally valid unless received by the Church as a whole).
A small nit to pick: Constantinople and Rome were already out of communion in 1054. Besides the contentious issues of Patriarch Michael's enforcement of leven bread on the Latins in Constantinople in retalitation for the Norman enforcement of azymes on the Orthodox living in Sicily, one of the agenda items in Cardinal Humbert's ill-fated embassy was the restoration of Rome to the Diptychs of Constantinople.
The diptychs of any of the local churches are the list of bishops considered Orthodox, and thus in communion with the given local church.
Best evidence suggests that Rome was removed from the Diptychs of Constantinople over the filioque, either as a result of its inclusion in the no longer extant election encyclical of Pope Sergius IV, or the coronation rite used for the German Emperor Henry II (which is extant, and includes the filioque). This would date the local breach in communion between Rome and Constantinople to 1009 or 1014.
Antioch and Jerusalem almost broke left communion with Rome before the Fourth Crusade, in response to the forcible replacement of Orthodox bishops with Latin bishops by the First Crusade.
Well of course the Orthodox are right!! :-)
Those are very perceptive remarks, David.
I still can't figure out how you get around the problem that the Assyrian Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox pose for this theory. Wouldn't we have to toss every Council after Nicaea and Constantinople I on the basis that Ephesus, et al., never were "received by the Church as a whole"? In one case (Chalcedon) a whole Patriarchate refused, and continues to refuse, it! Moreover, the Fathers frequently appealed to the authority of the Council of Nicaea during the Arian controversies in the fourth century, yet at this point Nicaea had not been "received by the Church as a whole" since the Arian and Semi-Arian bishops and laity were rejecting it!
"The king compelled Macedonius, patriarch of Constantinople, to anathematize the Chalcedonian synod, just as he had [so compelled] Elias of Jerusalem. But Macedonius said that apart from an ecumenical synod, having as its chief [Greek: proedron] the bishop of Rome, it is impossible [Greek: adunaton] to do this" (St. Theophanes, PG 108:360a; translation by David Palm)
"Because of his primacy, the pontiff of Rome is not obliged to go to all the holy ecumenical councils; but without his participation, manifested by sending some subordinates, every ecumenical council is non-existent, for it is he who presides in the council" (St. Methodius, cited in The Russian Church, N. Brianchaninov, 1931, 46)
"Without whom [the Romans presiding in the seventh Council] a doctrine brought forward in the Church could not, even though confirmed by canonical decrees and by ecclesiastical usage, ever obtain full approval or currency. For it is they [the Roman Pontiffs] who have had assigned to them the rule in sacred things, and who have received into their hands the dignity of headship among the Apostles" (St. Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, Niceph. Cpl. pro. s. imag.C 25)
Diptychs were of course the lists of bishops considered Orthodox, but these lisrs were often not up-to-date and not too many people were concerned about that.
One thing that everyone must bear in mind is that after 450 AD the Church essentially existed as two separate communities because of the language divide.
While officially, Rome was still one state, there was very little communication between the Greek and Latin wings, as the majority of people, even bishops didn't understand each other.
The issue that started the freefall was, of course, the invitation of the Franks to Bulgaria by the Bulgarian khan, Boris, who was shopping for a "better" church. This was not uncommon evn when the communion was effectively broken. For example the first Serbian king, was crowned by the Pope in the 12th century.
It was the Frankish teaching of the filioque to the Bulgarians that resulted in Greek reaction and the ventual expulsion of the Franks. The Franks then in turn accused the Greeks of "heresy" for "omitting" the filioque (shows you how little people knew of the Councils and their decisions -- in other words: nothing!). The Frankish king himself was semi-iconoclastic by the way. Political realities, however, forced the Pope to look the other way and use the situation to his advantage.
What do you think of this idea, my friend?
The non-convert Romans and the non-convert Orthodox get together and, as Benedict said, "listen to the other, understand his confrontations, eventually accept his apologies, and the gift of self", and re-establish what Pope Benedict XVI called "that full and living communion so longed for by Jesus in the Upper Room".
And then we could leave the zealot-convert Romans and the zealot-convert Orthodox = all of whom were something else a few years ago (usually Episcopalians or Evangelicals or disaffected Romans) and none of whom suffered the centuries-old atrocities over which they hold such feverish and freshly-minted grudges (what Pope Benedict called "the worm of resentment gnawing away in the soul"), and while the rest of us celebrate the eucharist together, they can exchange anathemas and excommunications - and give Monty Python something to make funny movies about!
And leave the rest of us re-united Christians alone!
I think it sounds like a plan!
Did you notice that he made this commitment on May 29 - the most fateful day in the history of the Eastern Church.
Kosta correctly points out that a rough ending point to the era where bishops in the East and West fully understood and agreed with each other was the 5th century.
The changes that happened in Western theology were mostly potential ones until they became linked with secular political ambitions of the Franks in the West in the 8th and 9th centuries, and they did not take place without resistance by what Fr. John Romanides calls the "West Romans," whose phronema was still identical to that amongst the "East Romans."
Whatever one calls them, there were individuals and forces in the West that did not embrace the new way of doing theology that primarily grew out of unbalanced (unbalanced by the teachings of other Fathers, that is) appropriation of some of St. Augustine's more speculative works. It isn't as though the East didn't have its own speculative works that were outside the pale -- they were just sidelined either as outright heresies or as personal speculations that were not accepted as part of the "consensus patrum."
For a number of reasons (and one of them was definitely the situation in Bulgaria that Kosta mentions), these two very different world-views first became fully aware of the existence of the differences between each other in the 9th century, and the clash was unmistakable. The conflict never really completely came to an end, and the Schism took place on a continuum (and with fits and starts, ebbs and flows), depending on where one lived in Christendom, from the 9th to the 12th centuries.
For example, B16, in his writings on liturgical art in the West, shows an understanding of this when he wrote (as then Cardinal Ratzinger) that the West has never fully come to terms with the 7th Ecumenical Council and has never made it its own. Thus, when Kosta points out the semi-iconoclasm of the Frankish rulers (and key clerical advisors), he is not making this up. The 7th Ecumenical council was in the 8th century (although the final defeat of iconoclasm in the East took place in the early 9th century), so by a rigid theoretical application of "Schism = 1054", there should have been full understanding on the theology of iconography between East and West, but there most obviously wasn't.
Right now, though, the most pressing problem is the one that jec1ny mentions at the end of his post:
Namely the problem of rampant liberalism and open dissent, so serious, that in some places clergy and even bishops who are Catholic in name either secretly or openly are in favor of making changes in the doctrines of the Catholic Church that would be much more in line with Protestantism. Many of these changes, such as the ordination of women, the acceptance of homosexuality, and a more tolerant attitude about abortion would certainly be unacceptable to the Orthodox. These issues by and large do not exist within the Orthodox faith. So to some degree the Pope will need to preserve his authority to reign in clergy who are straying dangerously close to what both the Catholic and Orthodox churches would call heresy.
I know that in my own city, while we Orthodox have very nice and cordial personal relationships with Catholics here, you would have a hard time convincing our parishioners (and we all attend one "middle of the road" parish that serves every possible ethnic group) that we share a common faith with the (quite liberal, but not atypical for America) Catholic churches here, and you would have a hard time convincing most Catholics here that they have more in common with us than they do with the local Lutherans and Anglicans.
I am one Orthodox who is holding out hope that B16 will set changes in motion that will make that less true some decades down the road. I know that I have been told my more devout Catholics than I can count that they hope we don't reunite, because they are afraid that the Catholic church as it now is would only infect and hurt us. A common theme amongst them is "we Catholics need to get our house in order first."
I think that Kosta's estimation of needing at least a century to prepare for any kind of council of reconciliation is not at all overstated.
We have had some frank discussions on the filioque and the Immaculate Conception on recent threads in which I think that those who choose to remain calm are both realizing those points where they misunderstand the position of the other -- and soberly also understanding (as annalex pointed out in her #12), that there are significant differences in worldview and the approach to "doing theology" that cannot be resolved through ambiguity and finesse of terminology.
A failure to recognize that will only lead to another Council of Florence, where Orthodox laity and common clergy reject any agreement hashed out by hierarchs. I suspect, as does Kolokotronis, that B16 has far too much insight into the patristic mind to attempt any unions that are not based on fundamental and organic agreement. I suspect that he also realizes that his primary task ahead of him to make this happen (as David observed) is to inculcate a new spirit in RC clergy and laity, and that encouraging them to have contact with Orthodoxy will promote that.
Anyway, those are my (not so brief, after all) thoughts. If I have given offense to anyone, please forgive me.
So I wouldn't consider intolerance or resistance to unity to be a trait of converts.
Don't forget those hotbeds of converts (not!) -- Mt. Athos and most other Greek monasteries -- who are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of union with Rome as things currently stand.
According to the new calendar of course. But I am sure it was no coincidence.
I am wholly opposed to distinguishing "cradle" Orthodox and "converts". There are Orthodox and heterodox, period. Those who are Orthodox in their hearts are Orthodox; the timing of their conversion is irrelevant. Those who are Orthodox only on paper are not Orthodox because their life is not. Our all-merciful God gives us until the last breath to convert; no one is keeping a score when that happens.
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It could possibly happen, Benedict has made statements concerning Judaism. Benedict has said the Jewish people are theologically correct in not believeng in Jesus as there messiah. St. Malachy's predictions of popes that have came true up to this time.....
here is the 111 which is Benedict “De Gloria Olivae” (From the Glory of the Olive). Conversion of the Jews? (maybe not conversion of the Jew's, but a Catholic reform to accept Judaism as theologically correct).The Benedictine order traditionally said this Pope would come from their order, since a branch of the Benedictine order is called the Olivetans. St Benedict is said to have prophesied that before the end of the world, a member of his order would be Pope and would triumphantly lead the Church in its fight against evil. A pope of peace and reconciliation, perhaps Benedict XVI will be a peacemaker in the Church or in the World, and thus carry the olive branch.
So this could be a kissing of feet so to speak...but I still don't see how Roman Catholics will accept a change in theology, it will be interesting to watch.
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